… Wait, why would they do that? They presumably make money on the route, or they wouldn’t run it (it’s not like it’s one of those routes you have to have even if it’s loss-making), and they have lots of 767s; they can just shift the Forbidden 767 elsewhere. Are you suggesting they’d scrap it out of _spite_? Not how enormous companies work in general.
Same reason we drop customers in SaaS , sometimes the custom ops effort is not worth the distraction and changing the software a) takes time and b) can be quite expensive and create new bugs.
If the software does not support Anti-Affinity basically it is going to be someone's job to make sure it doesn't get routed to this route and manually override when it does and avoid an Aviation regulatory incident imagine the headache if Ghana refused entry or refused that plane to board passengers if by mistake it land in Accura, and the PR circus around it.
The ROI on the route may not be not simply worth it. On the other hand Delta probably also do not want negative PR around scrapping the route immediately even if they wanted to. Routes rarely get scrapped overnight there are existing commercial agreements, government requirements, regulatory notices, operational change in ground support and so on to be planned and executed, even if they want to do that, it will take sometime to actually do it.
As I mentioned elsewhere, airlines have to do a good bit of special-casing anyway, largely for weird airports. If the Wong Sort of A318 lands in LCY, say, it may not be able to take off again (and in any case it would probably be a major regulatory incident).
There’s also a human in the loop who should catch scheduling software mistakes; it’s part of the pilot’s job to confirm that all is well before taking off.
I think there's a certain contingent that reacts to any regulation with "fine, then I'll take my ball and go home". Country has safety requirements, they deny any service to that country as retribution.
The real world has more shades of grey. Delta can probably put a note in their scheduling system to make sure the airliner in question doesn't go to that country. They also know how much money they lose if they take their ball and go home, and probably wouldn't even be flying the route if it was completely unprofitable. (There are probably partners that rely on the service, and maintaining a good relationship with business partners is important too in a less financially-obvious way.)
I mean I'm Ghanaian and DL156 is the only non-stop flight from the US to Ghana, and only one of two to the entire region afaik (the other being EWR to LOS)
Just going based on how long it's run, the prices myself and family have paid for tickets relative to destinations a similar distance away, observed usage of capacity on each flight, and the fact it has literally no competition, they wouldn't up and cancel it short of some sort of safety threat to their staff or business. Definitely not because a problem airliner gets noted.
Would you like to contribute your knowledge to the conversation then?
It seems like it would be a knee-jerk overreaction to be, but Delta obviously has a lot of management issues and a shortsighted knee-jerk decision from them (or most giant corporations) would not surprise me.
Well I'm Ghanaian, my parents flew back into the US on DL 157 just yesterday. DL 156 is the same flight that's taken me home since I was a kid.
And I guess even without the personal context, just common sense tells me that setting up a direct tranatlantic route and then keeping it going for as many years as they have should still communicate the profitability there, and that being told their plane with obvious safety issues isn't welcome isn't why they'd cancel the flight.
I guess to me it's just feels like a very US thing to think this. Like if you picture Ghana as some tiny African country it's obvious: you probably imagine it's just a small line item on Delta's balance sheet, duh big corporation doesn't care about your feels and will take their ball home...
But that's the only direct flight from the US to Ghana, direct flights from the US to West Africa are not common (afaik there's only one to Ghana and one to Nigeria) and they pretty much get to name their prices on the flight and keep demand (and knowing how much it costs me to visit home they very much do take advantage of that).
Delta had at one point been developing Accra into a hub for their other destinations in western Africa but not sure they're still going in that direction with the way the transportation world has changed in the past few years. Either way, they probably do have a good bit of investment in facilities there.
By cancelling the service to Accra, probably.